IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/glenvp/v16y2016i1p38-58.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Private Governance Undermined: India and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

Author

Listed:
  • Philip Schleifer

    (University of Amsterdam)

Abstract

Are emerging markets undermining private environmental governance? In the past, most trade in agricultural commodities occurred between developed and developing countries, but in recent years the volume of South-South trade has increased significantly. The booming demand from emerging markets for food, feed, and fiber is now a key driver behind agricultural expansion, causing large-scale deforestation and biodiversity loss in the tropics. By examining the case of palm oil, this article argues that existing private governance institutions are not well equipped to deal with this crisis. They continue to operate on the basis of a North-South trade model, trying to leverage the market power of big-brand companies to achieve their sustainability goals. However, the effectiveness of this mechanism is increasingly undermined by the rise of South-South trade and the different structure and institutional context of emerging market value chains.

Suggested Citation

  • Philip Schleifer, 2016. "Private Governance Undermined: India and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil," Global Environmental Politics, MIT Press, vol. 16(1), pages 38-58, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:16:y:2016:i:1:p:38-58
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_e_00335
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bloomfield, Michael J., 2020. "South-South trade and sustainable development: The case of Ceylon tea," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 167(C).
    2. van der Ven, Hamish & Sun, Yixian & Cashore, Benjamin, 2021. "Sustainable commodity governance and the global south," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 186(C).
    3. Dermawan, Ahmad & Hospes, Otto & Termeer, C.J.A.M., 2022. "Between zero-deforestation and zero-tolerance from the state: Navigating strategies of palm oil companies of Indonesia," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 136(C).
    4. Laura M. G. Hidalgo & Rosane N. de Faria & Roberta Souza Piao & Christine Wieck, 2023. "Multiplicity of sustainability standards and potential trade costs in the palm oil industry," Agribusiness, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 39(1), pages 263-284, January.
    5. José Carlos Marques & Burkard Eberlein, 2021. "Grounding transnational business governance: A political‐strategic perspective on government responses in the Global South," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 15(4), pages 1209-1229, October.
    6. Schleifer, Philip & Fiorini, Matteo & Fransen, Luc, 2019. "Missing the Bigger Picture: A Population-level Analysis of Transnational Private Governance Organizations Active in the Global South," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 1-1.
    7. Wilman, Elizabeth A., 2019. "Market Redirection Leakage in the Palm Oil Market," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 159(C), pages 226-234.
    8. Meier, Leonie, 2017. "Beating the Microbead: How private environmental governance has influenced the regulatory process of banning microbeads in the UK," MarXiv wpr8k, Center for Open Science.
    9. Hamish van der Ven & David Barmes, 2023. "The uneasy marriage of private standards and public policies for sustainable commodity governance," Business Strategy and the Environment, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(8), pages 5161-5173, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    economics; environment; politics; private; demand; sustainability;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q01 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - General - - - Sustainable Development

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:16:y:2016:i:1:p:38-58. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kelly McDougall (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.